Retelling
The Cosmic Epic
This event was held May 14–16, 2026 by Symbolic World in Broadview Heights, OH.
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Retelling the Story
Modern faith has been reduced to the “lyrical”: systems of personal comfort and moral guidance, fragments severed from the greater whole. But Christianity is an epic: a vast story stretching from the dawn of creation to the final restoration of all things, in which every nation, every age, and every human life is caught up in its cosmic drama.
This summit challenged us to reclaim that epic vision, and to trace the golden thread of redemption through the sweep of Western civilization and recover our place within the story that encompasses all stories.
Talks
Jonathan Pageau
A Story to Change the World
Jonathan Pageau summarizes the vision of a future shaped by the foundational principles of the epic Christian story. Q & A to follow.
Fr. Josiah Trenham
Heaven is a City: Christianity as Urban Pilgrimage
Fr. Josiah Trenham traces the Christian life as urban pilgrimage, the city not fled but transfigured, heaven not escape but the radiant destination of every street and every soul.
Mary Harrington
Rebuild the Monasteries
In an age of AI “slop” and flattened culture, how do we understand, and cultivate, what makes us distinctly human? There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Premodern practices of memory and prayer can refresh our imaginations and salvage our human cultures in the digital age.
Dcn Seraphim Rohlin
Recovering the Cult of the Hero: Founding Mythologies of the City of Man and the City of God
In ancient times, the fundamental organism of civilization was not the nation-state, but the city. The creation of the modern era necessitated not just the elimination of the Cult of the Saints, but of the old idea of heroism, replacing it with a succession of new hierarchies.
Heather Pollington
Ways of Seeing, Again
How do specific artistic languages fundamentally shape the way we see the world? This talk will explore how a medieval Christian vision could correct the ills of contemporary post-modern landscape, seeking to reignite and deepen our experience of the epic story, art and cinema.
Annie Crawford
From Mars to Apollo: The Cosmic Alchemy of That Hideous Strength
In That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis recapitulates the cosmic liturgy that structures all myth: descent, purification, and glorification. As we read That Hideous Strength, the story itself becomes a mode of participation in the divine work of our own transformation.
Kale Zelden
The Epic: Cosmopoesis and Liturgies of Remembrance
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales articulate a frame that affords an imaginal space for deep, participatory, communal play. Epic stories function as liturgies of meaning, rescuing ideals and projecting an eschatological anticipating parousia, linking human action and divine destiny
Dcn Nicholas Kotar
Kiev and the City on a Hill: a nation grows into its myths
Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin makes a startling assertion: that the fairy tales of the Russians were the distillation of centuries of the people coming to terms with their Christianization. These stories give us the template to do something similar for the myth of America.